6 threes 6 fours 6 fives

[Padraig Dooley]

I'm in the process of reading Seve's autobiography and in one of the chapters called 'Course Design: The Future', he states that whenever he can he designs courses with the six, six, six format.

One of the advantages he claims is that an area of 20 per cent is saved compared with a conventional layout.

Can anyone prove or disprove this claim?

[Jay Kirkpatrick]

Slightly different, but Primland's front nine has a 3-3-3 set-up... with the first four holes going 5-3-5-3

[Anthony Fowler]

I can certainly see this working if pulled off well.  However, the courses where the same par hole only repeats once seems pretty contrived to me.  If you randomly assigned hole numbers to these holes, there is less than a 1 in 500 chance that you would only have only one or zero repeats like this.  It seems like the architects in this case were trying too hard to achieve this (just like other architects try to hard to avoid back to back par 3's or an opening/closing par 3. 

[David Schofield]

Mississippi Dunes; Cottage Grove, Minnesota.

Terrible golf course, IMO -- though its  terribleness has nothing to do with its 6-6-6 layout.

The owner mostly designed it himself. Perhaps the Devil made him do it.

The Devil might be in the details -- but God was first. And God had nothing to do with the details at Mississippi Dunes.

I second that...